Offbeat Eats

A recent hiking trip had us passing through Claremont, New Hampshire during breakfast time. Claremont has a good selection of restaurants, but it also has several locations that just, for one reason or another, seem to be challenging for restaurants to find success. These locations have a rapid series of different restaurants back-to-back, while the local diners hope that at some point something finally manages to stick. One of those locations is on Washington Street, the main route between Claremont and Newport, next to the Burger King. This location has been more than a few restaurants in my years living in the area; of the ones I remember, it was a “flash-fired pizza” place run by Ramunto’s (which I actually liked), then vacant for a bit, and then for a few years it was Claremont Country Cafe (unrelated to the now-shutter Country Kitchen in Newport), then that changed into Fast Lane Diner, which only lasted for a few months before reopening as Odd Duck Diner and Donuts.

A recent trip over to Dover, New Hampshire resulted in us looking for breakfast options around the greater Hooksett area (the region between Concord and Manchester, NH, straddling the Merrimack River). Until very recently, this would have been an almost automatic choice of The Robie Store for breakfast sandwiches… but The Robie Store closed permanently a few weeks ago. So, after taking a look at various online reviews, I ended up picking Shirley’s Kitchen in Suncook Village as a good option. Their online media showed a mean-looking Benedict with some decent home fries, and I always have rather liked Suncook Village (just around the corner from Shirley’s is Oddball Brewing, which we’ve previously visited and enjoyed).

We recently had to do a short day trip over to the Adirondacks in New York, and that left us looking for a new place for breakfast on the drive over. We’ve had a lot of great little spots on this drive, like Sugar and Spice and Big Apple Diner, but on this particular trip our timing lead us to wanting to explore Fair Haven and Castleton a bit. We ended up going to downtown Fair Haven, where we found The Wooden Soldier.

My robotics judging in Falmouth required me to get up fairly early in the morning, before most every decent breakfast joint in Portland is open. But since Portland remains, to this day, an active fishing port, there are a handful of places that are open early in the morning, and right down the street from my waterfront hotel was one old school stalwart, Becky’s Diner, which opens at 5am.

As I mentioned in my review of Cedar Street Café, since the hotel we were staying in didn’t have on-site breakfast, it was a good excuse to go check out some of the local establishments, despite the relatively heavy snow. Our college Doc Tesla had given a hearty endorsement to a relatively new spot he had found just a few miles west in Sturbridge’s Fiskdale village, The Little Rest Stop, so we decided to go over and check it out.

While we were staying at the Sturbridge Host hotel for a few days (whose on-site restaurants, weren’t, at least for the winter, open), we decided each morning to venture forth and try various local breakfast spots for breakfast. The first we tried was Cedar Street Café, which is just down the street from the hotel, although confusingly, not actually on Cedar Street (it’s sister restaurant Cedar Street Grille is, and the parking lot entrance is across from the Grille, although depending on which mapping service you are using, you may get some odd directions). Another of the local restaurants owned by Table3 (same owners as The Duck), the Café focuses on coffee, breakfast, and light lunch.

One of the shortcomings of the greater Upper Valley area is that we’ve got a bit of a shortage of breakfast spots, especially if you are looking for something a bit more varied than “American Diner”. But in early 2025, we had a pretty big shift in White River Junction: the former Piecemeal Pies (which, after five years of business, shuttered abruptly in 2023 during bankruptcy proceedings) finally got remodeled and re-opened as a Turkish cafe: Cappadocia Cafe. Opened by Vural and Jackie Oktay, the owners of next door Tuckerbox (which has had its own interesting voyage transitioning from a Australian-owned coffee shop to a Turkish restaurant, but hey, variety is the spice of life) and Cappadocia Bistro in Burlington, VT, Cappadocia is primarily a breakfast- and lunch-based counterpart to the more formal dinner menu of Tuckerbox, offering an array of pastries, wood-fired flatbreads, and related lighter dishes.

A few years ago, there was a pop-up donut bakery, Farmer and the bell, that was making French-style cruller donuts in the back of the Angkor Wat Cambodian restaurant in Woodstock, VT each weekend. After getting quite a following (they’d regularly sell out after only a few hours), they first moved to doing a slightly larger bakery space in the Parker House in Quechee, VT, serving up donuts on weekends in 2022, and still selling out quickly. In 2023, as the owners were starting their family, they put the business on pause, raised capital, and leased a spot in east Woodstock where an old former gas station had been a perennial eyesore, and built their own store, opening in early October 2025. We’d been meaning to go for several weeks, but most times we were passing through Woodstock, their parking lot was completely full, and we figured we’d come another time. But during early January, we finally had a chance to stop by and check them out.

As I’ve mentioned in a lot of my recent reviews, 2025 was a year of my trying to take a lot of the local places that I’m frequently driving by and saying “I should check that place out!” and actually, well, checking the place out. In this case, we were doing a day trip down to Connecticut, and wanting to grab breakfast on our usual route to catch Interstate 91 to parts south of here. Usually, that means a visit to The Barn Café or The Daily Grind in Claremont (neither of which I’ve reviewed, but the Daily Grind has the same excellent menu and food as their sister restaurant Frazer’s Place). However, both were looking more than a little busy, so we decided to cross the river and check out one of our perennial “should try” places, Exit Ate in Weathersfield, VT.

During our visit to Fort Lauderdale for the Fraternal Order of Moai FOMCon, we stayed at the Ocean Manor Beach Resort, one of Fort Lauderdale’s older and more venerable beach hotels (Johnny Carson had a penthouse there, and the Rat Pack were regular 60s and 70s visitors). And it has a reasonably good Tiki bar out back with a nice breakfast, but after a few days, we really felt we needed to explore a bit and find some broader breakfast items. Which led us to a smaller café a few blocks away on Ocean Boulevard called Brew It Café.